And, bringing the heart, soul, and attitude back to Paris fashion, please welcome . . . Mr. Alber Elbaz!
There’s a little bit of a fightback against one-note, compliantly market-obedient fashion going on at the moment, and how nice it was to see Alber Elbaz putting Lanvin out there on the front line tonight. He staged his Spring collection literally as theater, placing the Lanvin name up in glittering lights at one end of the runway and sending out a show he said was a “manifesto.”
More on Elbaz’s underlying thoughts later. In the moment, it was the fast pace of his girls and their almost fierce range of character that turned this into a hit Lanvin variety performance. The show moved swiftly through “acts.” First, black and white daywear—pants and blouses with balloon sleeves or rippling flounces were followed by chic-simple silk dresses and sculptural cocktail numbers. Parodies of body-exposing draped jersey red carpet gowns, underpinned with nude corsetry, gave way to madly glittery party things with a wacky finale of busy Lanvin souvenir prints featuring patterns of shoes and bags, and funny graffitied handbags.
But back to the manifesto. Elbaz described in a preview how he’d been struggling to work through the puzzles confronting designers in a digital age. “What is relevant today? Is it need or provocation? Can fashion and theater coexist?” He concluded that he should try to show all-encompassing extremes, and, just as importantly, leave evidence of his work in progress. We saw that human touch in the black dresses that were collaged from several types of lace and the lines of white basting stitches left in the folds of a black gazar skirt. Still, there is little need for backstory explanations when the transcendent desirability of clothes speaks as directly to an audience as it did tonight.
